Basic Concepts in Algorithms

This book is the result of several decades of teaching experience in data structures and algorithms. It is self-contained but does assume some prior knowledge of data structures, and a grasp of basic programming and mathematics tools. Basic Concepts in Algorithms focuses on more advanced paradigms and methods combining basic programming constructs as building blocks and their usefulness in the derivation of algorithms. Its coverage includes the algorithms' design process and an analysis of their performance. It is primarily intended as a textbook for the teaching of Algorithms for second year undergraduate students in study fields related to computers and programming. Klein reproduces his oral teaching style in writing, with one topic leading to another, related one. Most of the classical and some more advanced subjects in the theory of algorithms are covered, though not in a comprehensive manner. The topics include Divide and Conquer, Dynamic Programming, Graph algorithms, probabilistic algorithms, data compression, numerical algorithms and intractability. Each chapter comes with its own set of exercises, and solutions to most of them are appended.

Shmuel Tomi Klein started teaching in high school, repeating to his classmates almost daily the lectures of their mathematics teacher. As a Computer Science undergraduate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he acted as teaching assistant in the Statistics Department and has since given courses and lectures on data structures, algorithms and related topics, in English, French, German and Hebrew. Klein's research focuses on data compression text processing algorithms. He is a full professor and former chair of the Computer Science department at Bar Ilan University, Israel. His book Basic Concepts in Data Structures was published in 2016 and he is a co-author of more than 100 academic publications and 10 patents. He is on the editorial board of the journal Information.